Jonathan Muecke's artful dining furniture for Knoll

The 'Muecke Wood Collection' by Jonathan Muecke for Knoll

(Image credit: Knoll)

published 9 April 2025

As long-time fans of the sculptural designs by Minnesotan artist and architect Jonathan Muecke, our antennae went to high alert when we heard he was working with Knoll on his first foray into manufactured furniture. The ‘Muecke Wood Collection’ consists of a dining table and chairs that beautifully express their construction with stacked cylindrical dowels, here shown with a walnut finish.

The collection bears the hallmarks of Muecke’s artistic practice in his playfully bold yet delicate treatment of form and effective celebration of material, carefully balancing wit with restraint.

Both table and chairs have an essential clarity with a wink of character. Wooden dowels will always remind us of Shaker furniture with all of its reassuring familiarity and integrity, albeit contemporised by Muecke with a certain tectonic modernity.

Living with furniture that looks like you might understand how it goes together (and maybe even fix it yourself) is comforting in our times of cluster chaos. ‘I don’t think about chairs and tables as objects,’ Muecke says of his collection. ‘I think about a chair in terms of material – as a marker of human scale, a physical record in relational space.’ We say pull up a pew and tuck in.

Knoll.com

Salone del Mobile 2025 takes place 8-13 April. See our full Milan Design Week 2025 guide for the must-sees

This article appears in the May 2025 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from 3 April, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

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Hugo is a design critic, curator and the co-founder of Bard, a gallery in Edinburgh dedicated to Scottish design and craft. A long-serving member of the Wallpaper* family, he has also been the design editor at Monocle and the brand director at Studioilse, Ilse Crawford's multi-faceted design studio. Today, Hugo wields his pen and opinions for a broad swathe of publications and panels. He has twice curated both the Object section of MIART (the Milan Contemporary Art Fair) and the Harewood House Biennial. He consults as a strategist and writer for clients ranging from Airbnb to Vitra, Ikea to Instagram, Erdem to The Goldsmith's Company. Hugo recently returned to the Wallpaper* fold to cover the parental leave of Rosa Bertoli as global design director, and is now serving as its design critic.